Kelley pushed his light brown bangs out of his eyes. The hair stayed where he placed it, back above his forehead, stuck with sweat from the sweltering day. His green eyes surveyed his classroom. None of his classmates were done with their essays yet. But Kelley was. He wished he could roll up the sleeves of his white button-down, the standard uniform at this school. But he couldn’t. Then he’d see.

Brendon finally finished the in-class essay. He leaned back in his chair, rolling up the sleeves of his uniform shirt to his elbows, wiping sweat from his forehead with his now-bare wrist. He tapped his fingers on the desktop, thinking how he would have assumed that such an expensive school would be able to pay for air conditioning. He looked over at the boy next to him, who was also finished with his essay. Brendon rolled his eyes internally. Of course he was finished. He was Kelley. He was also looking very uncomfortable, Brendon noted, with sweat dripping off of his forehead and down the side of his face. Brendon wondered why Kelley didn’t just roll his sleeves up.

Then Brendon thought of all those rumors, about how Kelley cut himself. That would make sense, Brendon thought, as to why Kelley would stay out the heat to avoid people seeing his scars. Brendon watched Kelley out of the corners of his eyes. He didn’t look like someone who’d cut themselves. Kelley was handsome, musically gifted, and easily the smartest student in the grade. Brendon had seen him at the piano in the theater a couple times. Kelley didn’t know he’d been listening. But he had, all the same. Brendon thought that he’d never heard anything as beautiful as when Kelley played piano.

Kelley saw Brendon watching him. He figured it was because he was sweating. Brendon probably wondered why he didn’t just roll his sleeves up, like Brendon himself had done. He figured Brendon probably knew why. He hadn’t done it in ages—not since he was fifteen. But the cuts were deep enough. The scars didn’t go away. No one had talked to them about cutting, like they did now. Kelley’s little sister told him that they learned about it. But no one had ever taught Kelley about it.

The first time, it had been an accident. He was shaving his face, and he dropped the razor. A messy cut spilled across his arm, pooling with blood. The pain of this cut made him forget about his dad for a second. As Kelley reached for a tissue to wipe the blood away, he realized this. He bit his lip, then, and just as an experiment, he slowly slashed another cut in his wrist. He was no longer thinking about the empty bottles in the hallway. He was no longer thinking about how he hadn’t seen his mother in three months. He was no longer thinking about the fighting or the yelling or the fact that Janie was alone out there, in that house with their father. All Kelley was thinking about was the blood. He liked the contrast, he decided, between the red of his blood and the pale, pale peach of his skin. Even more so against the white porcelain of the sink and the black of the night outside the window. And he did it again, harder, deeper. And again. And again.

Kelley cried, too, that night. He slammed the razor blade against the tiled wall of the shower, and then he collapsed in the corner farthest from it, sobbing silently into his arms. Blood smeared on his face and on his shirt. But Kelley didn’t care. Kelley didn’t care about anything anymore.

But everything was okay now. His dad was gone, his mother back. Janie wasn’t growing up to be a mass-murderer, and they’d even gotten a cat. Kelley swallowed, falling back to his seat in that overheated classroom. It was all over. Everything was fine.

Brendon looked over at Kelley again. He seemed to be lost in his own thoughts. What did geniuses think about? Brendon wondered. Did they think about the same things everyone else thought about? Did they think about sex and television, and what they were going to eat that night? No, Brendon thought. Geniuses would be above that. Geniuses would think about being geniuses.

He wondered if Kelley knew he was a genius. Because he so very obviously was, Brendon believed. Kelley was maybe the smartest person Brendon had ever met. Finally, the bell rang. The teacher told the class to turn in their essays, finished or not. Brendon caught a spot in the line to the turn-in bin just behind Kelley. It wasn’t often that he got to be this close to him. Not that he liked it or anything. The thing was just that Kelley was intriguing. Whatever Brendon’s (questionable) sexual orientation, he felt that he would always be curious about Kelley. The window was open, now, letting a cool breeze sweep through the sweltering classroom. Brendon watched as the other boy’s light brown hair fluttered slightly in the wind. Kelley dropped his paper in the basket and headed out the door. Brendon followed him, tailing just slightly behind. He knew where Kelley liked to go after school: The theater. To his piano.

Kelley looked around before slipping into the theater. The only person in the vicinity was Brendon, at the drinking fountain, but Kelley knew he wouldn’t follow him. In the air conditioning of the theater, Kelley sighed. Finally, cool. He swept up to the stage where his piano sat. Well, it wasn’t strictly Kelley’s piano. It belonged to the school. But Kelley felt that he was the only one who cared about the piano at all. He was the only one who played it every day, he was the only one who tuned it and dusted it. It was, for all intents and purposes, Kelley’s piano. He sat at the bench, thinking. What would he like to play today? Running through the lists of ballads, self-arranged piano versions of pop songs, and classical piano tunes, Kelley kept finding his thoughts returning to Brendon.

If there was one thing Kelley had learned, having a guy on your mind didn’t always mean trouble. But it did always mean that you had better watch your step, or you could fall. “But falling in love isn’t always a bad way to fall,” Janie had told him. “Because when you fall in love, there’s always someone to catch you.”

Janie said a lot of things like this. There she was, twelve years old and already wiser than Kelley was. He was glad that his sister hadn’t been too affected by their father. She didn’t seem to like him very much. She’d always told Kelley, “You shouldn’t still love daddy, Kell. Daddy hurt people. Daddy hurt himself. He doesn’t deserve to be loved by someone as wonderful as you.” Kelley had smiled and patted his sister’s hair.

“I’m not that wonderful.” He’d said.

“That’s because when you look at yourself, all you can see are your scars. You can’t see that new skin has grown over them. Stop think about what happened. Start thinking about what’s going to happen.”

But Kelley didn’t know what was going to happen. So instead, he played piano. He let his fingers fall on the keys… middle C… G… high C… Without any further hesitation, he began to play the Prime Minister’s theme from the movie Love Actually. Of all the music in that movie, this was his favorite.

About halfway through, Kelley felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He knew that feeling. It was the kind that he got while he was sleeping in Janie’s room because she was crying, the kind he got when he knew his father was right outside the door. The kind that meant someone was behind him, watching him.

He stopped playing abruptly, and turned around to face the empty theater. He shook his head, squinting at the back stalls to make sure no one was in the shadows. No one was. Kelley returned to the piano, this time beginning the Portuguese love theme from the same movie. They were essentially the same song, using the same notes in different rhythms, different patterns. But they both carried the same sweetness, the same sense of lighthearted love and energy. The sort of sound that said “I love you” without meaning to. This morphed into the Glasgow theme… back into the Prime Minister’s… when finally, Kelley couldn’t take it anymore.

He faced the empty audience on his piano bench. “I know you’re there,” he said, though he didn’t. Not really. But Kelley had learned that if he pretended someone was there, they’d come out. If no one was there, then he hadn’t embarrassed himself in front of anybody, had he?

But he had been right. From the back stalls, a figure rose. Kelley raised his hand to shield his eyes from the near-blinding stage lights. The figure still stood in shadows. But slowly, he made his way to the stage. “Why’d you stop playing?” Brendon asked slowly, sitting on the edge of the stage.

“I didn’t know anyone was listening.”

“What song was that?” Brendon asked, looking at his hands.

“Three songs. They’re all from Love Actually. You ever seen it?”

“Yeah, once.” Brendon sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“I figure… you probably don’t like people listening to you play. That’s why you come here all alone. But you… you play so beautifully.”

Kelley swallowed, taken aback slightly. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Brendon gave a sad sort of smile. “But I’ll go. You seem to like being alone.”

He stood and was halfway up the aisle when Kelley called out, “Wait! Brendon, you’re wrong.”

Brendon turned around. “What?”

“You’re wrong,” Kelley whispered, but the acoustics of the theater made it so every word was discernible to Brendon, who made his way back to the stage. “I don’t like being alone. I hate being alone.”

Brendon sat back down, his legs hanging off of the edge of the stage. Kelley sat beside him, cross-legged, facing the back wall of the theater, examining the layers of curtains that hid it. Facing his piano. Brendon looked at him. “Then why do you push everyone away?”

“I don’t. They push me away.”

Brendon took Kelley’s wrist gently in his hands. Slowly, he pushed up the sleeve. He looked intently at the white lines cut horizontally across the pale skin. “Why’d you do it?” he asked softly.

Kelley looked down, his light brown hair falling into his face. “It made everything else hurt less.”

“That’s stupid,” Brendon snapped unexpectedly.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me! You talk to people when you’re having problems. You don’t… you don’t… And if you really wanted to hurt yourself, why didn’t you do it vertically? Everyone knows that’s worse.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to kill myself.”

“Sure seems like you wanted to.”

“Yeah.” Kelley was a little bit in awe that Brendon’s cool fingers against his skin could feel so good. He wasn’t used to feeling good.

Brendon ran his thumb across one thin scar. “Why didn’t you?” he whispered.

“My sister needed me.” That was really only part of the truth, Kelley thought. The whole truth was that while Janie did need him, he didn’t want to die without ever talking to the beautiful boy that sat across the room from him in English during sophomore year. The one who sat beside him in English now. The one who sat beside him onstage now, holding his wrists, stroking away his mistakes. “Are you glad I didn’t?”

Brendon looked up, startled that Kelley had asked him that. “Yes,” he replied simply.

Kelley swallowed. “Why?”

Brendon’s fingers slid from Kelley’s wrist and towards his palm. Lightly, Brendon intertwined their fingers. Kelley’s breath hitched as both boys examined the end result—the long, slender, pale fingers of the piano player against the shorter, tanner fingers of the other boy. “Because I’d miss you.”

“You didn’t know me. You never even noticed who I was.”

Brendon gave him a strange look. “Of course I did.”

“Then why didn’t you ever say anything to me?” Kelley asked.

“You didn’t look like you wanted to listen.” Kelley suddenly stood, pulling Brendon up with him. He made for the piano bench, still tugging Brendon behind him. He sat down, and so did Brendon.

“Well. Now it’s time for you to listen,” he said. And he began to play. The Prime Minister’s theme flowed out of him, and Kelley put in all the words that were missing—not by speaking, but with his eyes. Brendon watched him in awe.

It was one thing, Brendon thought, to listen to Kelley play. But it was another thing entirely to listen to Kelley play for you. At the end of the song, Brendon stayed quiet, trying to retain the peace that Kelley’s song had brought upon them. “That was beautiful,” he finally whispered.

“I was playing it for you,” Kelley said self-consciously. “Even before I knew you were there.”

“Deep stuff, Kelley. That’s a love song, you know.”

“I know. That’s why I played it for you.”

Brendon smiled a little. “We shouldn’t be like this.”

“Like what?”

“In love.”

Kelley grinned. “I don’t know if you noticed, but I do a lot of things I shouldn’t do. Besides…” he trailed off. “Anyone can fall in love. And really… is it such a bad thing?”

Brendon shook his head. “Falling in love is okay, ’cause there’s always someone to catch you.” Kelley looked back at him, startled. That was what Janie…Brendon’s smile grew a little. “So you might as well just jump, Kelley.”

“And you’re sure you’ll catch me?”

“Mmhmm,” Brendon said. “Every time.” And then he leaned forward, on the bench of the other boy’s piano, and kissed him. Chaste was about halfway out the door at the rate those two were going. If anyone had entered the theater right then, they would have heard the low keys on Kelley’s piano clashing horribly as the other boy pushed the pianist on top of it. But the boys couldn’t even hear it. They were too busy with each other.

And really, who could think about what the piano was doing when all that was running through their minds were the love songs from before? Love, actually, Kelley decided, is all around.

A/N: So, obviously I love that movie. Disclaiming the last line, which is from the movie and all, but anyway, I think that was very different from what I normally do. I don’t know. I mean, it’s fluffy like always, but it has a different style. Much less talking. A little darker stuff in the beginning. So, I dunno. But I liked it. Did you? Let me know. That is called reviewing, people, and it totally could be a way of life if everyone wasn’t just a lazy-ass ;) Love you if you read this, and thank you for that. Now please review. Please. Yeah, the declarations of love came fast. I know. I apologize.